Study finds pretraining loss can predict RL scaling before saturation
heghbalz · x · 2026-07-21
Pretraining loss appears to predict RL scaling in a non-saturated regime
The thread reports a quantitative finding: in the non-saturated regime, pretraining loss predicts post-RL pass@1 at fixed RL compute.
- The authors fit a local log-linear law.
- Reward slope increases roughly linearly with log pretraining tokens.
- The attached plots show strong correlations between pretraining metrics and observed RL reward slopes.
Related event: New Research Proposes Joint Scaling Law for Pretraining and RL(18 posts)→
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